7 Day Mountain Bike Stage Race. Are You In?

BC Adventure
By Eric Comeau

The BC Bike Race is unlike any event in the world of cycling. It is a 7-day race from Vancouver to Whistler, averaging 60 km per day. 75% of it is single track, contested by 500 riders. This group contains every level of mountain biker, from Olympians to people who have travelled halfway around the world just to see if they can make the time cut each day. Most riders compete in a 2 person team category, where teammates must start, finish, and stay together the entire day. My teammate was Daniel Gifford; a long time friend and about the only one I could talk into trying this. We were joined by Daniel’s wife, Debra, and fellow Texan, Jennifer Joy. For both Daniel and I, the whole race was to be a new experience and we decided to simply learn as we went. How else can you approach racing for 8 days on trails you had never been on, while sticking together the whole time?

Lesson 1: The best pace is your own.

When you have a 500 person mass start, it becomes quite easy to try to gun it up the first climb or fly down the hill at a speed that might be just above your pace, after all that is what racing is about. And being the younger member of the team, I was often the one wanting to do those very things. Daniel would keep telling me to “just ride our race” or “stay in our limits”, and sure enough, almost every time, the team that dropped us on the first climb would be the one we finished with at the end of the day.

Lesson 2: You are in it together.

While they have a solo category in the race, everyone I talked to said the same thing, it is just not the same as doing it as a team. The team race is a challenge and it is frustrating. You feel like you are holding up your teammate one day, and want them to hurry up the next. You talk trash about who rode over the last section cleaner, you wait on them, they wait on you. You give them your last full bottle, they put your dislocated shoulder back in. At times you may ride ahead of them to get away, but at the end of each stage you cross the line together, high five, and are happy to be a day closer to finishing, and happy to do it all again tomorrow.

Lesson 3: You will have a bad day, and it will get worse if you let it.

I think we have all finished a race and said “if only x would not have happened”. I quickly learned to throw this idea out for this event.  When mountain biking this many days in a row, your bike will break, you will have at least 1 bad fall, and you will have a day where you are POSITIVE your brakes are dragging the entire time. Taking these things in stride and remembering that everyone else will have the same issues makes all the difference. If you get mad about the bad luck you just had, more is sure to find you. Just sit back, breathe and enjoy the ride. After a week of racing, we had covered almost 300 miles of trails, climbed almost 45,000 feet and finished 10th overall. We also learned a few things; maybe you noticed that all of the lessons we learned apply to life just as much as a bike race. Thanks to Daniel, Debra, Jen, NWCC, Tad Hughes Custom, and the countless people who sent us well wishes while we were racing. I can’t wait to do it all again.